Headlines & Stuff January 7, 2013

Written by: Digitally Approved

Here are some cool things we read about this past week:

Facebook Introduces Poke for Mobile
Right before the holidays, Facebook released the ‘Poke’ iPhone app. The poke feature has been a part of Facebook since 2004, but the mobile experience is new. With the app, you can “poke” or send a quick message, photo, or video to your Facebook friends. Each message expires after a specific time you’ve set: either 1, 3, 5, or 10 seconds. When the time runs out, the message disappears from the app. The Poke app appears to be a direct competitor to Snapchat, an app that lets you send photo messages to friends, which expire in seconds. In other Facebook mobile news, the social network recently added voice messaging to its messenger app. Click here for more info.

Twitter Lets Users Add Music to Their Profiles
While Twitter users may not be able to share Instagram photos anymore, SoundTracking lets them integrate visual and audio media directly into their tweets. With SoundTracking, select a song to tweet, and a picture of the brand will display as the song plays.

There’s No Avoiding Google+
Google+ is challenging Facebook by using a controversial tactic: requiring people to use the Google+ social network. The result is that people who create an account to use Gmail, YouTube and other Google services – including the Zagat restaurant review site – are also being set up with public Google+ pages that can be viewed by anyone online. Google Chief Executive Larry Page has sought more aggressive measures to get people to use Google+, and some company executives say that even more integration is coming. “Google + is Google,” said Vice President Bradley Horowitz. The move will allow Google to blend mounds of data about individual users’ search habits and websites they visit with their activities on Google+.

Latin Americans Spend 56% More Time on Social Networks
According to a comScore report, Latin Americans spend 56% more time on social networking sites than the worldwide average. According to the findings, Argentina is Latin America’s most “social addicted” country, with an average of 9.8 hours on social networking sites in November, closely followed by Brazil, which ranked at second with 9.7 hours. Peru, Chile and Mexico also appear within the top ten global markets. While Facebook is now the market leader by far (115 million visitors in November), other players are making progress. LinkedIn is now the second most visited site in Latin America, ousting Twitter, which now ranks third in the region.

Noteworthy Campaigns

Delta Lingerie Uses Facebook Poke App for Campaign
Just days after the release of Facebook’s new Poke iPhone application, the app has already been used for advertising purposes in a creative campaign for Delta Lingerie. The campaign was based on 10-second clips of a model putting on lingerie from Delta, which was filmed using Poke and sent to Facebook users who liked the model’s Facebook Page. At the end of the clip, the last frame reads, “A One-Time Sale! Delta,” driving users to the Delta website. Watch the video case study here.